Tuesday, 24 January 2012

HEAVY HITTER HITS TWITTER...

Heavy hitter 's arrival on Twitter

Grimwood.

No, this
is not – despite the potentially misleading italics –the title of a dystopian JG Ballard novel set in some bleak, composite post-industrialOrbital town of his feverish neon-and-concrete dreams; rather, it is one of the truly great middle
names of county cricket – perhaps second only to Troutbeck,
should the question ever crop up on Family Fortunes (thusan answer more likely to win you a caravaning weekend in Abersoch) – a name that happens to
belong to arguably the Shires’ massivest recent underachiever: David ‘Jumble’ Sales,
good enough to make 210 not out against Worcestershire on debut for Northants as an
18-year-old, and who, at the time (1996), seemed anointed by The Cricketing Gods an indeterminate combination of nature and nurture to have a stellar career. But
things didn’t quite pan out as expected – much like Ballard’s fiction, in
fact – and instead, aged 34, he stands with a none-too-flattering first-class
batting average of 39.27, while each year there seem to be less people willing
to claim him as one of the best players never to have played for England. In
fact, one preposterously
named blog shoved the big lad into their County Flops XI of last year. All
a great shame, no doubt.

Anyway, I’m moved to write about Sales not just because there’s
not a portly cricketer yet to have played the game that I don’t admire, but also because – given what I assume to be a
self-effacing nature for a man who’s probably the cricket equivalent of Matt Le Tissier: a chubby
yet/and inordinately talented one-club man (and an equally unfashionable
backwater of a club at that) – it has not been entirely surprising he’s yet to
appear on Twitter, approved medium of public cockstroking and gushspoutery
(guilty, m’lud)…

Until now.

At first glance, I thought his avatar was the Twitter
default image. But no, closer inspection reveals it’s his great oviform bonce, alright. Expect some meaty tweets, some heavy-duty batter patter – for, as the Wantage Road regulars will tell you, he
always was good at giving it some humpty…

DJG Sales

Twitter default image

NB: On the off-chance he’s reading this, the author would like to apologise sincerely to
Mr Sales. It’s not a (cheap) shot I really wanted
to play, but I was forced to take risks because of the, erm, match situation. Scoreboard pressure.